Changing S.A.'s breakfast

By Edmund Tijerina :
July 5, 2012
: Updated: July 7, 2012 1:09am

Robert Fleming, owner of the Magnolia Pancake Haus, has opened a new location for his iconic San Antonio restaurant on Huebner road. The restaurant is open from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. seven days a week. John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Photo By San Antonio Express-News

Robert Fleming (center,behind counter) owner of the Magnolia Pancake Haus, waits for an order of their well known Munchener Apfel Pfannekuchen. The restaurant is open from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. seven days a week. John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Photo By San Antonio Express-News

Robert Fleming, (standing in white outfit) owner of the Magnolia Pancake Haus, serves up a specialty item to customers Monica Garza (left), Deanna Zavala,11, and Alex Garza (right). The restaurant now has a second location on Huebner road. John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Photo By San Antonio Express-News

Robert Fleming, owner of the Magnolia Pancake Haus, has opened a new location for his iconic San Antonio restaurant on Huebner road. Fleming works the line and tends to the same duties that the rest of the staff carries out. The restaurant is open from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. seven days a week. John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

Photo By San Antonio Express-News

This is the well known Munchener Apfel Pfannekuchen (apple pancake) from the Magnolia Pancake Haus. (Friday June 29, 2012) John Davenport/San Antonio Express-News

This is the 10th in an occasional series about San Antonio Tastemakers who have changed the flavor of food in the city.

There was a time not that long ago that San Antonio's breakfast impresario didn't like pancakes.

Actually, it was more that Robert Fleming was burned out on them from childhood. That is, until he went to a job interview at a hotel in Minneapolis in 1988. He remembered the owner telling him to make sure he tried them, saying, “They're the world's best pancakes.”

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Yeah, there ain't no such thing.' I was a Catholic kid in Chicago, and I grew up eating Bisquick pancakes every Friday during Lent for my entire life. I hated, hated pancakes,” Fleming recounted. “There was no such thing as good pancakes. So I figure I gotta get the pancakes. I take one bite and say, ‘Damn, this old boy is right.' These are the world's best pancakes, and they truly are.”

Fleming went to work at that hotel, received that recipe from the chef, almost threw it away several times over the years and later incorporated it when he designed the menu for Magnolia Pancake Haus, 606 Embassy Oaks.

In just more than 12 years, Fleming has changed the way that many San Antonians eat breakfast, moving from a small location to a larger one and now building a second location at 10333 Huebner Road near the Medical Center.

This is still very much a breakfast taco kind of town, but Fleming introduced breakfast on a different level.

His restaurant makes its own pancake batter from scratch several times a day, so it rises correctly when cooked. His team, with formally trained chefs heading both locations, makes its own syrup, brines its own brisket for corned beef to make corned beef hash, makes its own Canadian bacon, roasts its own turkeys for club sandwiches, turkey hash and frittatas, cracks its own eggs to make scrambled eggs and grinds its own beef for lunchtime hamburgers.

As he described it, “I tried to bring elements of an upscale experience to the breakfast segment.”

“We started with a 103-seat restaurant. My goal was to keep a roof over my family's head and send my daughter to college,” he said. “Well, 12 years later, we're still under the same roof, she graduated from college and now I've got two restaurants. I guess it all worked out pretty good.”

Originally from the northern suburbs of Chicago, Fleming was the second of seven children. He learned how to cook while his mother was pregnant with his youngest brother and put on bed rest. She would sit at the kitchen table and instruct him how to slice, dice, chop, sauté, braise and handle all the basic cooking techniques.

From his father, he learned the breakfast basics, how to make bacon and baste eggs with bacon grease.

His restaurant career began when he was 13. He began with a then-legendary steakhouse, Henrici's, working for a cousin of his mother. Mostly, he cleaned up after tradesmen constructing a restaurant, and his mother's cousin explained that he was helping to move them along.

After a break from working for high school, he went to work as a dishwasher at a Greek steakhouse and rose to pantry, to prep and then to working the broiler. At 17, he was the lead broiler guy in a busy steakhouse.

In 1978, he moved to San Antonio to attend St. Mary's University and got a job in the dining hall so he wouldn't have to buy the meal plan. He learned about making comfort food from the chef there. At one point, a food service director noticed that Fleming spent more time in the dining hall then at class and suggested the young man attend culinary school instead of university.

He went back to the Midwest and received a degree in culinary arts and hospitality management from Harper College, in the Chicago suburbs.

“These were in the days when it was not glamorous,” he said. “We were the sweaty dogs in the back.”

He received the advice that he needed to learn how to work in the front of the house, in service and management, if he wanted to have a successful career. So he did, working with different hotel groups, including Hyatt and Intercontinental.

In 1983, he met Sheila, the young woman who would become his wife. The following year, they came to San Antonio. She and her grandfather wanted him to open a restaurant.

In those days, the Cajun theme was huge, so they opened Steamers Café in 1984 at the corner of Bitters Road and West Avenue.

It received good reviews, but lost a lot of money in its four years of operation. Fleming said they were in debt some $40,000 in back taxes and they owed the state some $20,000.

He was able to return to hotels, and found a job as food and beverage manager at the Sheraton Airport in Minneapolis. His mother gave them her old car, lent them a credit card for gas, and the couple and their then 4-month-old daughter made the trip.

It was while working in Minneapolis that the chef at the hotel shared the recipe that would one day change Fleming's life.

“He gave it to me and said, ‘You keep this. You're going to want it one day,'” Fleming said. “So I took it home and I put it in my food file. ... There were many times I would have that pancake recipe in my hand. ... Do I really need this recipe? Well, Lyle said someday I'll want it, so I'll hold on to it, because they were great pancakes.”

Ten years after the chef told Fleming he would want the recipe, his prediction came true. Fleming was laid off from his job. By then, he oversaw a portfolio of hotels. With his severance money, he decided to get back into the restaurant business and do a breakfast place.

They thought about opening an Original Pancake House franchise but soon realized that they could do a better restaurant on their own. They found a ready-to-open spot at 13444 West Ave., near the Embassy Oaks shopping complex, and opened in 2000.

A couple of months after opening, they received a glowing review in the San Antonio Express-News and things began moving. Because of the restaurant's consistency and focus, business built steadily and quickly. Raves included USA Today, “Diners Drive-Ins and Dives,” and nearly annual kudos in the local Readers' Choice awards. Six years later, it moved across the parking lot to a larger spot.

One item that seems almost quaint now is a note in the original Express-News review mentioning the 15-minute wait. Now, the waits routinely last an hour to an hour and a half. After a dozen years, most diners know to expect a wait and either bring something to read (patrons now often bring an iPad or Kindle), or they leave their cellphone number, run a quick errand and get a text when a table is ready.

Then came the health scare that Sheila Fleming said “took the nasty out” of her husband.

In 2008, what he thought was a sinus infection didn't clear up with antibiotics; further testing revealed a Stage 4 squamous cell carcinoma in the oropharynx area of his tongue that had spread to both lymph nodes. Then, another test showed a lump on his right lung. If the lump on his lung were cancer, his prognosis was that he would have had a year at most to live.

“They said, ‘We're 90 percent sure it is (cancer).' That means it's 10 percent it isn't, and I've bet on horses with way worse odds than that, bro, and they came in the money, so let's go,” he said. “The Lord sent me my first miracle. It was not cancer, it was scar tissue,” he says of the lump on his lung.

In all, the doctors at the START Center for Cancer Care had him undergo three rounds of chemotherapy and then radiation. He lost about 70 pounds, his energy and his sense of taste during 2009, what he describes as a “lost year.”

Even if he couldn't do much of anything, he made sure to come in to work.

“I felt like these people were working their asses off to make it happen for me,” he said. “I owed it to them to show up, to do everything I could to make sure they were supported and had everything they needed.”

While he recovered, he watched food television and planned ways to improve the restaurant when he got back to work.

The following year, they got rid of trans fats, high-fructose corn syrups and artificial flavors. Many of the items they sell are natural and organic, but he talked about how it's important that their food is now “clean.”

“People know it's good food,” he said. “They can taste clean flavors and know it's not out of a box or out of a bag.”

With a new chance at life and an opportunity to keep off most of the weight he lost from the cancer, Fleming knew there was a greater purpose in his life — but what?

The answer led him to build a second location.

“In a really busy world, we're all going a hundred directions at once. If I can create a place where (people) can sit for an hour and reconnect over a good meal and strengthen family ties, that's a pretty darn good thing, too,” he said. “We're providing community in a crazy world.”

After looking at several locations, they made an offer on a property on Huebner Road last March, closed in July, began construction in October and opened in May.

The usual Magnolia lines formed immediately, and the place has the same feel as the Embassy location.

One item that will be different is a Munich-style biergarten that's coming this fall to the Huebner location.

It will be open 3-9 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from the first day of Oktoberfest in Munich to late November or early December, depending on the weather, and in the spring Feb. 15-May 1.

It will have a dedicated selection of beers and wines, including selections from a local brewery.

Among the German munchies he plans to offer are pretzels and Nuremberger bratwurst and Muenchner weisswurst, made in-house.

Don't look for other Magnolias anytime soon, much less a franchise. Fleming has seen too many charming little places turn into behemoths after scaling up to multi-unit locations.

“(Franchising is) about money, and I just don't need it,” he says. “I don't have a need to be wealthy that way. I'm wealthy in spirit, I'm wealthy in blessings. I make good money doing what I do, but I don't have the need to have the big house and the fancy cars and the vacation place here and there. ... If it were about the money, I'd be buying the cheaper bacon and this and that, but it's more about the end result and the journey.”